Kitchen worktops in Primrose Hill

Yes. Tall narrow houses where the kitchen sits at garden level at the back of the lower ground, one room deep, so you are working to a 3-4m single run with a small return and rarely an island. The stucco terraces have shallow rear extensions rather than full-width returns, so the room stays long and thin no matter what the designer draws. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. The parking dictates the sequence, not the kitchen.

early Victorian stucco terrace, Regency terrace, conversion flat and mews. A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. We measure the front door, the hall width and the turn into the kitchen before anything comes off the van, because a 3m piece has to swing through that corner on edge and stone does not bend to help you. What the building will take decides how it is fixed.

Permit-only bays, waiting restrictions along most of the crescent frontages, and houses set behind railings with a bridge to the raised front door and a separate area stair down to the kitchen. Everything goes down those area steps under the front bridge, through a railing gate that is frequently under a metre wide. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nobody sets a worktop down mid-flight to change grip.

Worktop installation, in that order. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A tenant moves in on the date on the contract. The area-stair route caps slab size long before the kitchen does, so plan joins around what will physically pass the railing gate rather than around the sink position.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Support first, stone second. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The overhang is checked again once the feet are set. Supply only, material begins at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on separate lines rather than as one number.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A void between tenancies has no spare days in it. Describe the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the schedule rather than met on the day.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The laying order follows the shape.

There is nothing to pay before the template visit. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The whole run is dry-fitted before any adhesive is opened.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Protection comes up only when the last piece is inside.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Scribed one piece at a time.